Almighty Video Game Designer

Chapter 10: Chapter 9 A High Opinion

Translator: Exodus Tales Editor: Exodus Tales

Translated by Coldtaco

Edited by Aelryinth

Qiu Hengyang didn’t mind. After the laughter from the audience died down, he continued, ”As for the last question, the ad space at the top of the gameover screen!

“Many entry-level video game designers share a common shortcoming: not paying enough attention to the profit model, completely disregarding it at the start of the design process.

“For example, Hunter Island, the game in second place. It is a relatively mature adventure game. However, the designer hasn’t thought of the profit model, which I think is a shame.

“It’s not that you’ll succeed after silently finishing a game design. Just like directing a movie, even if you get good reviews, if the seats to your movies are completely empty, that wouldn’t be success!

“If you haven’t considered the profit model, you can only put your game on the market and sell it for some standard price.

“Let’s say that a game like Hunter Island sells for ten RMB. So far there’s three hundred and thirty recommendations. Say that eighty percent of the three hundred and thirty are willing to pay, a pretty generous estimate, then the profit of Hunter Island would be two thousand six hundred and forty RMB.

“On the other hand, if FlappyBird also based its profits from purchases, I can guarantee you that it’ll fail badly!

“Obviously the designer has thought of this, making it free to pay and profiting through ads. This was an excellent move and suits the game’s special characteristics very well.

“The total time you guys spent playing was three hundred and forty-nine hours. Lets say that on average each run lasts for ten seconds, a generous estimate, and most probably don’t even last for three seconds.

“That works out to one hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred and ten deaths, meaning that within the hour of testing, this game has shown a hundred and twenty thousand ads!

“Moreover, the reasoning behind the ad placement is quite explicit. As the players who like games like FlappyBird are definitely mobile gamers, and more intensive users at that, it means the players that stay are the more patient players!

“Therefore, if I was the designer of another mobile game, I would consider buying this ad space. Let’s say one in every thirty people engages with the ads in FlappyBird and one in every ten of those would make a purchase. Therefore, if I bought the adspace, I would’ve gotten four hundred eighteen and eight-tenths purchases.

“If every purchase was ten RMB, the profit I get from buying the adspace is 4,188 RMB. I would be willing to invest at least three thousand RMB for the ad space... already surpassing Hunter Island!

“There’s another point of note! Hunter Island uses a single-purchase model. The number of players who like these types of games are already small in the first place, and they certainly wouldn’t buy it a second time, meaning that the profit over time decreases.

“As for FlappyBird, because it spreads like an infectious disease, its user base could experience explosive growth. Moreover, the adspace can be changed on a fixed-time basis. I’ll buy it this month, and next month will be bought by someone else, this way the future profit is guaranteed to a certain extent.

“Therefore, the gap in profitability of FlappyBird and Hunter Island is actually massive!

“The above points are why I think a game like FlappyBird could succeed. Most importantly, the author managed to combine all the points, basically making the best decision for every single aspect. That’s what’s most surprising to me!

“To be honest, if you gave me six megabytes of resources to make a game that has a higher profitability than FlappyBird, I don’t know what else to say than... I can’t do it!

“That’s all I have to say, emcee.”

Qiu Hengyang turned off his mic and gestured for the emcee to move on to the next round.

The audience was so shocked that no words came out. Maybe that was too much praise?

Qiu Hengyang wouldn’t be able to do it to this level using 6 MB of resources? Didn’t that mean that the ability of the author in mention surpassed a B-grade video game designer? There had to be some sort of threshold for this kind of praise, right?

However, the words of Qiu Hengyang did have evidence backing up his claims and provided plenty of insight to his analysis. Many of the audience following the thought process of Qiu Hengyang also agreed that FlappyBird might seem simple, but it had a lot of minute details.

Obviously this designer number Seven had planned all parts of it from the start. Perfect balance between self harm, bragging rights, and ad revenue. This was a near complete game that was also very profitable!

As they said, professionals have a different perspective. After some analysis from Qiu Hengyang, a majority of the audience also thought that FlappyBird was quite impressive.

Chen Mo couldn’t help but look at Qiu Hengyang when he opened his bottle and took a sip of water.

In truth, Qiu Hengyang came up with the reasoning for the adspace profitability by himself.. Obviously he hadn’t researched too deeply into the statistics of games. Evidently it wasn’t a big concern for video game designers in this era.

According to statistics in the previous world, FlappyBird had more than fifty million downloads. The maker, Nguyen Dong, had fifty thousand USD, or three hundred thousand RMB, going into his bank account every day, just from the adspace.

According to the rate of banner ads at that time, every thousand ad views would result in 0.15 US dollars, or about one RMB, meaning that FlappyBird would show three hundred million ads a day.

Using the same rate of one RMB per one thousand views, the FlappyBird that Chen Mo displayed a hundred and twenty thousand times, amounted to about a hundred twenty RMB.

Even if it was a slightly more expensive pop-up ad, increasing it tenfold to twelve hundred RMB, Qiu Hengyang had obviously overestimated.

However, Qiu Hengyang was correct about one point: the biggest advantage this game had was the potential explosive growth! This was especially so with the online leaderboard function added to further increase its growth. That was its basis of guaranteeing income.

Obviously, Chen Mo didn’t want to argue against Qiu Hengyang, and he didn’t even have time to celebrate. He knew that his champion position in the competition was secured after so much praise coming from Qiu Hengyang.

Moreover, Qiu Hengyang was able to make all that analysis within an hour of play testing, including the rough estimate for income, which Chen Mo thought was very impressive. Compared to the other judges, it was obvious that Qiu Hengyang’s skill level blew Shi Huazhe and Lin Hai out of the water.

-This world still had some geniuses, not all of them are mindless slaves like Shi Huazhe.-

Shi Huazhe’s expression looked unsightly. Qiu Hengyang’s analysis basically asserted that he was wrong in front of everyone, embarrassing him. How good could he feel after that?

Among the two judges, one said that it’s garbage and worthless, the other praised it as a genius invention. Obviously, only one of them was right. In fact, most of the audience were on Qiu Hengyang’s side!